Of Montreal: Icons, Abstract Thee EP

Of Montreal: Icons, Abstract Thee EP
Polyvinyl: 5/8/2007

This five-song EP serves as an appendix to Of Montreal's most recent album, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?. The album is sublime in its own right, and it's only by chance that it hasn't yet come up in my rotation for recommendation on this blog. Icons, though, is solid enough to warrant a recommendation separate from its companion album.

Icons starts on an upbeat note but it soon crashes into despair. The marital problems of Kevin Barnes and his wife, which were alluded to on Hissing Fauna, take center stage here. This kind of thematic consistency could have easily grown boring fast, but luckily Barnes is too restless to let that happen. The songs change direction unexpectedly, almost at random, with an impishness that belies his heartbreak. This yields some bizarre results. For instance, on "Miss Blonde, Your Papa Is Failing", Barnes manages to cross-pollenate the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" and the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", which is not an easy feat. "No Conclusion", a nearly ten-minute epic, sounds like several songs that shift seamlessly into one another, like conjoined quadruplets. Icons reveals an oddly satisfying paradox in Barnes' songwriting. The random shifts in tempo, meter and instrumentation suggest a short attention span, but Barnes exhibits meticulousness and attention to the tiniest detail.